My research focuses on popular, grassroots receptions of ancient cultures, and in how communities build relationship with the past. My work is inherently interdisciplinary and I blend approaches from Classics, Anthropology, Modern Languages and Performance Studies.

I am currently working on my monograph about receptions of Graeco-Roman antiquity in the popular oral poetries of Northeast Brazil. The travelling cantadores of the region are inheritors of African and indigenous oralities and troubadour traditions brought by the 16th-century Portuguese to Brazil. Graeco-Roman mythologies accompanied them in this journey to Northeast Brazil, where they then contested, conversed and syncretised with other regional influences. I argue that these traditions offer a crucial case study for the limits of existing models of classical reception, the mediation of antiquity through Early Modernity, and the syncretisation of classical antiquity with oral traditions globally. These interactions reveal novel complexities in Northeast-Brazilian popular poetry, its political function and its dialogic transatlantic history. This research was conducted through extensive research trips across rural Norhteast-Brazil, during which I conducted interviews and made recordings, and through collaborations with Brazilian universities and archives. 

I recently co-edited the volume Time, Tense and Genre in Ancient Greek Literature with Edith Hall, which will be appearing in print next year with oxford University Press. My extended introduction to the volume enabled me to explore my interests in cultural, theoretical and religious notions of time, and how they relate to literature. My own chapter for the volume, 'Contesting Bardic Temporalities', looked at how ancient Greek bards politically create and contest poetic temporalities through performance. 

My other publications include a study of a 19th-century Brazilian erotic parody of Ovid ('Degenerating the Classical Canon in Brazil: Bernardo Guimarães’s Ovidian A Origem do Mênstruo [‘The Origin of Menstruation’] (1875)') and a chapter on how Graeco-Roman myth is used to depict cultural conflict in Northeast-Brazilian popular poetry ('The Graeco-Roman as an Arena for Conflict: Classical Reception, Popular Poetry and Power in Northeast Brazil').

I am also collaborating with the Mexican poet Pura Lopez Colomé to translate her collection Via Corporis (awarded the prestigious Premio Xavier Villarrutia) into English.

I enjoy working with contemporary poets and artists. I organised events with independent publishers Enitharmon on poetry translation, and on the relationship between words and images, and was an invited speaker at the British Library on artists' books and chapbooks.